Archive for the ‘The Pilgrim’ Category

For the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

We recently documented that Malachi Martin wrote the book, The Pilgrim under the pseudonym Michael Serafian.

The book, The Encounter by Malachi Martin reveals that he also wrote The Pilgrim under the pseudonym Michael Serafian (click image to enlarge, see upper left)

According to the biography of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Spiritual Radical(pp.253-254), Rabbi Heschel, with the AJC, arranged for Malachi Martin’s book, The Pilgrim to be published as a political tactic in hopes that it would influence deliberation on the draft for Nostra Aetate which had met setbacks at the close of the second session of the Second Vatican Council.

The Pilgrim was flanked by similar editorials, articles and interviews published in the New York Times, Time magazine and elsewhere. One article published October 1964 in The Jewish World quoted an unnamed Vatican source invoking extermination language saying “the Most Holy Father still has not made up his mind on the Jewish issue at this time, the final solution is still to come.”

Those familiar with Malachi Martin may recall his admission to Ben L. Kaufman of the Cincinnati Inquirer that during the Second Vatican Council he “enjoyed” making Cardinals who didn’t go along with the Nostra Aetate agenda sweat by “shaking long-closeted skeletons” at them (“Jesus Now Author Not A Swashbuckler,” Ben L. Kaufman, The Cincinnati Enquirer, December 22, 1973). Traditionalists have typically interpreted this to mean that Martin dug up dirt on prelates of a personally sinful nature.

With that thought in mind, consider some ‘skeleton shaking’ from Malachi Martin’s writing in, The Pilgrim:

There is yet another tension which is ominous for Christianity because its roots not only go back to the very origins of Christianity, but involve the historical act of Jesus Christ by which Christianity came into being as a principle. The tension is that between Jew and Christian, the historical act is the sacrifice and death of Jesus himself. The manifestation of this tension on the part of Christians is generally called anti-semitism or Hebraeophobia …… if we listen to the chorus of the ages, we find a strangely consistent note of disapproval, sometimes of hate, and always of unmitigated condemnation for the Jew, as such, echoing down the corridors of time and blending with latter day sentiments which can be recognized as nothing else but rank anti-Semitism. And these ancient voices are not merely those of secular or freelance thinkers: they are no less than the Fathers of the Church, an Irenaeus, a Tertullian, a John Chrysostom, an Augustine, as well as Aquinas, modern theologians and ancient exegetes, an Origen, Grotius, a Müller.

Somehow or other, the stream of this perennial Christian bias grates on our modern ears, and yet there is hardly any Christian or Catholic who cannot, in spite of himself, hear some echo in his own sentiments.

… It is true that we can set down a list of statements by popes theologians, saints, writers, to show that the extremer forms of anti-Semitism … are not admissable. But none ever asserted the religious rights of Judaism in itself, nor declared that Judaism was a valid moral outlook, nor has any theologian or theological school courageously re-examined the millennial attitude of Christians and Catholics to the Jews. (Malachi Martin aka. “Michael Serafian,” The Pilgrim, pp.44-46)

Martin then goes on to re-examine Christianity himself, finding fault in the “radically changed outlook” of St. John’s Gospel which he finds at variance with Sts. Peter and Paul (who themselves are not without blame, according to Martin). By the time we reach page 49, Martin is weaving Christianity into a tapestry with Nazi ‘extermination’ camps:

From the 6th century onwards, we find that anti-Semitism is an integral part of Christianity. And down to our own day, it has taken various forms. It may assume the form of an accepted radicalism with sociological overtones, in business, in social life, at the club, on the beach: one does not marry into Jewish circles or consort with Jews, for they are a different race with different customs and differing mentality. It may take the form of mere isolationism: the Jew is somebody apart, somebody irrevocably separate from the truth. Here there is an instant refusal to treat them like others, a blind feeling that this person, the Jew, is marked out by divine decision as untouchable. It may, though, take on a more mobile form: the Jews are to be reckoned with as active enemies of the Faith, and therefore they must be restricted, watched warily. It may, finally, go further and translate such feelings into action: the Jews must be expelled, must be warned, must be punished, must be dispossessed, must be liquidated.

In these extremest forms, we meet some phantasmagoric developments: the Protocols of Sion, The Nazi Final Solution, the massacres by their Catholic Majesties of Spain, the so-called Judeo-Communist world plot against Christianity, and the unholy alliance between the Grand Lodge and the Synagogue to subvert Christian principles. In whatever form or shade or colouring we meet this anti-Semitism, its peculiarly Christian characteristic is clear.

… Between the burning and plundering of all Jewish synagogues in Mesopotamia in 388 A.D. on the order of the Bishop of Callinicum and the destruction and desecration of all synagogues under the recent Nazi regime, we cannot but see a relationship of origin. And no one conscious of what has made modern Europe can deny that the pyres and the crematoria, the mephitic smoke and stench of the extermination camps in Nazi Germany, were, if not the logical conclusion, at least one extremist consequence of the normal Christian attitude to the Jews. Here we see Christianity standing at the thin edge of self-destruction due to this admitted tension, moving to what Laurence Dobie has called aptly the anus mundi [i.e. anus of the world], the ultimate in excretion of the badness which Christianity never undertook to extirpate. (Malachi Martin aka. “Michael Serafian,” The Pilgrim, pp.49-52)

As we can see from Malachi Martin’s own words, he was not merely a womanizer, liberal, spy, and con-man, but one of the most treacherous figures in the entire history of the Church, a hater of Christians and Christianity at its very core and an active destroyer of both. He was a partner of Rabbi Heschel and the AJC in attacking Christianity and Christians’ souls, invoking Nazi exterminationist imagery in the international press to instill guilt and embarrassment to shape the outcome of a Church council.

Martin worked with Rabbi Heschel and the AJC towards the outlandish and hypocritical goal of promulgation of a Church document which would denounce Christian pressuring of Judaic conversion while themselves employing the unbearable pressure of outrageous ‘anti-Semitism’ accusations and Nazi exterminationist comparisons amplified by the international establishment press. They schemed for a condemnation of the charge of Deicide by leveling the charge of Judeocide.

While Heschel and Martin were unsuccessful in achieving the full extent of their ambitions, they did set in course the technique and operation of the ‘Holocaust’ guilt chambers within the Church which largely accounts for the miserable state of affairs we find ourselves in today.

Malachi Martin received a fellowship from the Judaic gatekeepers of the Guggenheim foundation to write The Encounter in which he extolls post-Nostra Aetate Judaizing developments at the parish and school level.

The title page of Malachi Martin’s book, The Encounter states that he wrote the Judaizing book The Pilgrim under the alias “Michael Serafian”

“In New York’s Roman Catholic Parochial Schools a new course in Judaism and on the Jew in literature was planned for the autumn of 1968. The Sisters of Notra Dame de Sion and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations plan to sponsor jointly a series of two-week institutes on Judaism for Catholic educators. On January 21, 1968, sermons were preached in all 225 Roman Catholic parish churches in Brooklyn and Queens on the theme of ‘better understanding and charity towards our Jewish neighbors.’ Catholic Universities have inaugurated courses in Judaism given by resident or visiting rabbis. As a means to stem, influence, and destroy Roman Catholic Hebraeophobia, these measures are both necessary and good.” (Malachi Martin, The Encounter, p.376)